availability -- taking down a slave and having everything else converge
onto the remaining slaves in well under a second. A load balancer
handles this much faster than the vast majority of clients configured
with multiple servers, and there's no client delays as they vainly
attempt down servers.

In OpenLDAP 2.4, the client library allows clients to register a call
that "shuffles" URIs configured via ldap_initialize(). This is used in
the proxy backends to take note of a failing server, moving it to the
end of the URI list. A "smart" client that repeatedly needs to
establish connections to a list of URIs could do the same in order to
avoid having to run thru the URI list until one responds. Dumb clients
could exploit this by actually contacting a back-ldap/meta configured
this way. Of course, this would move the single point of failure to the
proxy...